The Clear The Pantry challenge…

Both Shawna at Gardening Nude and Robbie over at Going Green Mama have decided to descend into the depths of their various food storages places and pull out what’s been lurking in there forever. To actually eat all that stuff hiding back there before it goes bad, and at the same time to stop buying more food until what’s already there is eaten.

This is another one that makes me cringe a little, because I so need to do it…For me it’s not so much the cupboards as it is the freezer, since I have a heckuva lot of stored food in there that I just haven’t prepared yet, and we keep buying more. And whenever a helping or so of chili or chicken piccata doesn’t get eaten in time, it goes into a container in the freezer. I have quarts of stock in there. There’s a frozen whole chicken in there somewhere too that I’m going to make in my crockpot one of these days too. Bread cubes waiting to be bread pudding, shredded zucchini waiting to be bread, and I have this feeling I froze smaller portions of last year’s cranberry relish in there as well. If I’m ever going to eat this stuff, I’m going to need to take a good inventory and then make a meal plan for a few weeks, and get it the heck out of there.

Anyway, if any of you are braver than I, head over to one (or both!) of these delightful ladies’ blogs, and join in the challenge with them…In the meantime I’ll be trying to work my way through the half-empty jars of Stuff in my fridge…

I do this on a regular basis! My 5 cu ft freezer exists in my trailer for the main purpose of keeping hawk food, so when more goes in, my stuff comes out! And when you only have about 10 cu ft of pantry space anyway, it’s a necessity.
What I’ve learned is that it makes for shorter grocery lists, less waste, and very creative recipes!

It seems like every January I find myself with a pantry/freezer challenge. It’s partly to keep the food bills down so I can pay off Christmas bills, but it’s also part of my instinctive need to organize in January.